(An edited version of this article originally appeared in the
July 2001 Skeptical Inquirer).

The Socorro, New Mexico UFO "Landing" of April 24, 1964 has long
occupied a prominent place in UFOlogical lore. The case put New
Mexico on the UFO map, and was only overtaken by the Roswell Incident
when that legend emerged from obscurity and blossomed in the late
seventies. The case is still highly regarded; Patrick Huyghe recently
wrote about the Socorro sighting in The Anomalist, No. 8 (Spring
2000), in a piece titled "The Best UFO Case Ever? A Review and Update
of the Socorro Incident."

The witness in the Socorro case is a well-respected policeman,
Lonnie Zamora, who claimed in the report he filed (included in
Project Blue Book, Brad Steiger, Ed., 1976) that he saw a flame in
the sky, "bluish and sort of orange too...sort of motionless flame,
slowly descending. ... narrower at top than at bottom...Sun was to
west and did not help vision. Had green sunglasses over prescription
glasses. Could not see bottom of flame because it was behind the
hill....noise was a roar, not a blast..." The policeman drove around
the area trying to see the flame again, and said he suddenly came
across "a shiny type object ... oval in shape. It was smooth - no
windows or doors. ... seemed like O in shape and I at first glance
took it to be overturned car." He also described "two people in white
coveralls...two persons..." Zamora said he saw the two people at a
distance of 150 to 200 yards, and that "they appeared normal in
shape... but possibly they were small adults or large kids." He also
noted "what appeared to be two legs of some type from the object to
the ground...the two legs were at the bottom of the object, slanted
outwards to the ground." Zamora then got closer to the object, got
out of his car, heard a loud roar, saw a flame, ran, bumped his leg,
lost his glasses, and kept on going. He saw the object fly up, and
move 10 to 15 feet above the ground, and then leave the area
"travelling very fast." He radioed his dispatcher to look out his
window for "an object .... it looks like a balloon." Nearby, the
bushes were still smoldering. News reports in the local paper, El
Defensor Chieftain, also mentioned "an unidentified tourist" who
remarked about how "aircraft flew low around here," and that the
strange object was a "funny-looking helicopter, if that's what it
was."

Zamora's earnest nature and credibility, along with the physical
traces, brought the Socorro "landing" to national attention. J. Allen
Hynek came to town, and was very interested in the pod-like tracks
and burn marks at the scene. Ray Stanford wrote a whole book about
the incident, Socorro Saucer in a Pentagon Pantry. Phil Klass came to
investigate. The Socorro event has appeared in numerous books and
articles, and was even featured on Unsolved Mysteries. But what
really happened there?

There are numerous hypotheses, of course. Stanford thinks it's
another case of extraterrestrial visitors and government cover-up.
Phil Klass, in UFOs Explained, makes a case that the whole thing was
cooked up by the mayor to give Socorro some publicity. (Incidentally,
Klass argues that the "unidentified tourist" could not possibly have
seen both the craft and the police car.) Yet another hypothesis is
that physics students with a little too much extra time played a
trick on the town, but that rumor doesn't have much credible support.
Major Hector Quintanilla, the Blue Book investigator for the Air
Force, looked into the possibility that the craft was a prototype of
the Lunar Landing Module being developed for the Apollo moon program,
but found that no lunar lander prototypes were operational in April
of 1964. Recently, Larry Robinson of Indiana University has suggested
that Zamora saw "a manned hot air balloon." That scenario does match
some aspects of the descriptions, such as the pitch changes from low
to higher frequencies Zamora reported hearing from the flame, which
might be a match for the propane burners of hot-air balloons.

Yet another possible candidate has emerged in recent years, about
the time of the identification of the source of the Roswell Incident
to a specific program, New York University constant-level balloon
launches from Alamogordo in the summer of 1947 ["The
Roswell Incident and Project Mogul," S/I July August 1995].
One of the participants in these launches, Charles B. Moore, stayed
in Socorro and taught atmospheric physics at the college there, New
Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (my Alma Mater). Moore, now
retired, has had a very distinguished career, and received the
prestigious American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)
Otto C. Winzen Lifetime Achievement Award for his scientific
exploits, which included flying a balloon to the very edge of space.
He visited the Socorro "landing" site in 1966, and thinks that Lonnie
Zamora is sincere, and that he really did see something strange on
that day in 1964. In 1995, a colleague of Moore's who ran the Skyhook
Balloon program at Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, Bernard
"Duke" Gildenberg, learned from Capt. James McAndrew, the AF's point
man on Roswell, that on April 24, 1964, there were special tests
being conducted at the north end of the White Sands Missile Range
(WSMR) involving a helicopter used to carry a Lunar Surveyor around
for some tests. A portion of the WSMR Range Log obtained by McAndrew
appears below. Surveyor was a three-legged, unmanned probe, which was
used to learn about the moon before the Apollo program got there. In
fact, the Apollo 12 astronauts paid a visit to Surveyor 3 almost
three years after it had landed on the moon. This new angle on the
old Socorro story was first mentioned publicly in a brief piece in
the July 15th, 2000 edition of James Moseley's Saucer Smear.

Portion of WSMR Range
Log for 24 April 1964

The timing isn't right for the UFO sighting -- the range log calls
for morning tests, and the sightings occurred in late afternoon - but
then things don't always go "according to plan," and many tests which
have defied completion by morning have been known to somehow get
finished up in the afternoon. In fact, bombing runs scheduled for
that part of the range might have delayed the tests.

There are many other tantalizing bits that might support the
Surveyor explanation for Socorro.

o The Surveyor tests were done with a small Bell helicopter that
supported the craft from its side. The helicopter and spacecraft
would have presented a bizarre profile. The Surveyor's slanted legs
fit Zamora's description well, and are also a match for the shape of
the "landing pod imprints" found later. In Stanford's 1976 book, he
mentions Phil Klass's comment that landing pads like Surveyor's were
among the only practical shapes for that function.

o The spacecraft used vernier engines and attitude jets to probe
and sample soil, which could explain the flames the policeman saw,
and the burn marks many saw. The flames weren't being used for lift;
that was supplied by the helicopter. The burn marks at the site did
not indicate sufficient thrust to lift a large vehicle, according to
Hynek.

o The Surveyor used a mechanical scoop with a shape that matches a
rectangular trough photographed at the Socorro site.

o Zamora described the craft as "aluminum-white," which certainly
matched the bulk of the Bell helicopter.

o The tests missions were manned by a helicopter pilot and a
Hughes engineer ... two persons, in white coveralls.

o Most people in Socorro, and several of the investigators,
thought it was most likely a secret government experiment, and some
Blue Book researchers even pinned it down as a tenant operation run
by Holloman, the base for the Surveyor test flights.

Of course, this new evidence is far from conclusive. A lot has
happened since 1964, and it's difficult to reconstruct events from
that long ago, especially events with strong implications. Was it a
college prank? A hoax? A balloon? An alien craft from another world?
Perhaps we'll never really know. Gildenberg is confident that William
of Occam, of Occam's Razor fame, would think kindly of the Surveyor
explanation, especially over some of the other contenders.

Three years after the unmanned craft Surveyor 3 landed on the
moon, the Apollo 12 manned mission touched down nearby. This image
shows mission commander Pete Conrad retrieving items from Surveyor 3;
the Apollo 12 lunar module appears in the background.

Photograph by Alan L. Bean, courtesy NASA.

The Socorro Landing has a special place in my heart, as it sparked
my first skeptical curiosity. Back in 1964, I was an 11-year old boy
living just 90 miles north of Socorro, and the Socorro UFO story was
big news in the young boy community. Some neighbor kids drew the
outline of an alien foot in the alley, and tried to convince me it
was real, but I "debunked" the assertions by pointing out the
unnatural concave shape of the "feet," and the over-large distance
between prints. After the neighbor kids confessed, I penciled in a
little UFO on a photograph of my back yard, and showed it to them. I
expected them to laugh it off as yet another hoax, but was surprised
when the former hoaxers bought into my doctored photo hook, line, and
sinker. That was my first encounter with the Power of the Paranormal;
I'm sure it won't be my last.